8. The Concept of the Worker in the Works of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger

Title: The Concept of the Worker in the Works of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger

Author: Abdalbarr Brown

Reader: Uthman Ibrahim-Morrison FFAS

Publication date: 26th October 2013

Assalamu alaykum. Welcome to the Civilisation & Society Programme of the Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies. This is the eighth of 12 sessions which make up the Society Through Literature module. Today’s paper on the concept of the worker in the works of Ernst and Friedrich Jünger has been prepared by Abdalbarr Brown who, unfortunately, is not able to be here to present it in person. Therefore, I will do my best to deliver it on his behalf, and I hope he will forgive my lack of command of German pronunciation. The entire session will last approximately 1 hour and comprise a lecture of around 40 minutes, followed by a 10 minute interval, and ending with a short question & answer period. You are encouraged to make a written note of any questions that may occur to you for clarification after the lecture.

“...Alien to the old languages, to the Greek mythos, to the Roman law, to the Bible and the Christian ethic, to the French moralists, to the German metaphysic, to poetry around the world. Dwarves on real life, technical goliaths – therefore monstrous in critique, in destruction, therein hidden to them lies their task. Of an exceptional clarity and precision in everything mechanical: misshapen, atrophied, and blurred in everything that has to do with beauty and love. One-eyed titans, spirits of darkness. Deniers and enemies of all creative energies – they could sum up the million years of their efforts without leaving behind one work that could amount to a blade of grass, a grain of wheat, a mosquito wing. Distant from the poem, the wine, the dream, games and helplessly ensnared in the false doctrines of arrogant school masters. But they have their task.”1

“There are many points of view around the Leviathan. They do not determine him; they locate him. One is not allowed to take his own (location) too seriously.”2

We live in a realm of mythic and elemental beasts...

Imagine if you will, a sunny day on any street in any city, suddenly you hear a loud roaring noise. This is the modern world isn’t it? Nothing you’ve not heard somewhere before. The only difference is that this roar is a little louder, slightly more intrusive. As you look in the direction of the noise you see a black shape slowly rising on the horizon. It is enormous by any standard, a modern harpy, terrifying if you would only stop to think about it, but you carry on. Why, because this is just another day outside of a military transport base.

You might ask why I would begin this essay about the concept of the worker in the works of Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger in this way. I believe that this description depicts a way of looking at the modern world that eludes the majority of mankind. We tend to look away and not think about our technology and by extension all the other works that go on around us. But the overwhelming and impossible flight of that military transport plane brings with it the essence of what our technology has become over a hundred or more years. Martin Meyer, author of one of the great introductory works on Ernst Jünger, says this of Jünger’s subject matter:

“One lives in a condition, in which one must first learn to see.”

I will be using a German word during this essay that although common enough in English usage should be reviewed for its meaning. In German the synonym for gestalt is the visible form of some material. It speaks to what is visible to the eye, but implies the entirety, or you might say, the essence of something. If you think of Goethe’s concept of the ur-plant you have an idea akin to the nature of the word gestalt. One observes the totality or gestalt of all plants in any single plant around the world. Jünger sees beings as comprised of three categories. He says:

“Type, name and gestalt go back once again to the core of the matter. In order to perceive a gestalt or, as Goethe called it, experience; it requires a more thorough equipage than an excellent lens system, because to see and to describe or even to paint is always only a signature of gestalt, not its essence. Has the eye perceived the sign in its enormous wealth, so it must rather close in order to get an inkling of the unity that can only remain approximate: a concealed and resting contrast to the endlessly turning world. Goethe’s dislike of glasses, microscopes and telescopes is a consequence of that.”3

Jünger also describes that act of seeing as something extraordinary:

“The perception of the Gestalt is a revolutionary act in that it recognizes a being in the complete and unitary plenitude of its life.”4

You could say seeing something like this, is to see its essence and know its workings. This is the goal Jünger had in his studies and reflections about the worker, to attain a deeper understanding of his nature. Type is characteristic, the name is the worker, but what is the Gestalt of the worker? Jünger sought to express the perception of the worker in its deep form, to experience its meaning as deeply as possible. So when we speak of the gestalt of the worker, it is to go from the outward perception of him as a proletarian with all the other signifiers that Marx and Hegel have used to define him, that is, to proceed from his historic origin to the deeper more meaningful understanding of who the worker is and why he hasappeared as he has in this age of ours. It is to separate the worker from his legend as it has arisen in the Marxist approach. Jünger says:

“It remains to destroy the legend according to which the essential quality of the worker is an economic quality.”5

In Jünger’s view this Gestalt has far greater implications. When he wrote the words in the opening paragraph, he had already survived the trenches, and now survived the rise of the Nazis to power, their decline, descent into a disastrous war and finally their laying Germany to waste. He had seen and felt more keenly than my words dare describe the horrors of modern technological warfare. I do not know what was worse, the endless barrage of the cannons, huddled in fear of a direct hit in the trenches, or the bombings and fire bombings of the civilian populaces during World War II, equally huddled in fear of an uncertain fate. Maybe this comparison is mute maybe there can be no comparison. It is just simple horror.

I want to explore the way Ernst Jünger saw these events. I hope that you already have a taste with the introductory poem of how he uses imagery to describe these things. When Jünger writes it is almost with a style that Ezra Pound described as the ‘ideogrammic’ method. It is to perceive abstract concepts with concrete images. Jünger’s perspective is not derived from a material world though. We will be entering into the world of Greek myth the one closest to him and to us, where the metaphors of the gods and the titans reign. We will begin to see energies and movements that have long surrounded us in this age, with a new and different eye. It is also necessary to remember that we are talking about what is happening in our world around us to get a glimpse of the creation. I also want to remind us all of a saying of Ibn Arabi. I’ll paraphrase; he said words to the effect that Allah is easy to understand while the creation, on the other hand, is very difficult to understand.

The curious entry we began with in Ernst Jünger’s Diary is dated September 27th 1947. This is two years after the end of the war, Jünger has not only seen the fall of Hitler and his cronies from a firsthand perspective, but he is now witnessing the movements of the refugees and the occupiers as well. He has seen allied tanks and vehicles roll through the village of Kirchhorst more than once, an overwhelming force of mobilized iron. He is witnessing this for the third time in his life. He saw one mobilization as a young man and revelled in it. Soon after the beginning of the First World War he, like all the other men, had become disillusioned. It would be a game of survival from there on out. Thereafter, he watched how the battle for the soul of Germany was taking place and would ultimately lead to the next mobilization of “the iron ones”. This time parades of iron rolling down the streets in his country presaging the next disaster. Three catastrophic events in his lifetime, how to understand them?

He writes in his work Maxima-Minima, Ad Notes to the Worker:

“The rapid acceleration with which not only society and states change but also animate and inanimate nature, assumes causes that are neither satisfactorily explained by historic nor even by human development. It not only changes relationships but also the common ground from which they grow. Uncharted territories appear. Elementary powers enter under guise of history. Man is understood not only as a historic but also as a natural being and with him plants and animals, the surface and the depths of the earth and the sea their atmospheric embedding. Time itself begins to change: the historic world with its cultures fills a valley that runs between a mythical twilight and the severity of the godless world as between Lebanon and Anti-lebanon.”6

Outwardly, history is occurring but this is not a satisfactory explanation of such great movements. He recognizes a power appearing that on the outward is driven by man but inwardly has its own science and motivation. It appears detached from everything traditionally historic and human. Its logic is irresistible, its aesthetic symmetrical. It rolls on wheels and tracks and moves faster than a horse. It flies through the air in an open contradiction of its weight. It floats on the sea. It is made of iron or other metals and runs on fire derived from earthen fuels, in a word: infernal. It is found not only on the battlefield but also in the city in its power plants, halls and factories driven by the same elemental forces.

It is a severe and godless world that we have come to inhabit. It is a world dominated by elemental forces; forces so singular in their power that they have command over the elements, but not necessarily over the life that occupies those elements. So it is that Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger began to see the forms around them in a different light. Friedrich said in his work about the titans:

“The titans are not gods although they beget the gods and enjoy divine worship in the realm of Zeus. Due to it being a world without gods that they rule over, the one who wishes to imagine a cosmos atheos (a godless cosmos) but not like exact sciences describe it – he will find it here. The titans and the gods differ from one another and this difference becomes visible in their conduct with mankind because man experiences directly how they rule; he is able to distinguish them by virtue of his experience. He is able to know them not from the work of his experience but rather by a commanding through which experience is first established.”7

So it is that by the inexorable command of technic the titans are experienced by man. Who has not looked at the machine and seen something of life in its movements? It may be soulless, but it moves, makes noise and exhibits all the other characteristics of the living by means of power. The machine is alive by the force of the elements and the characteristic that ultimately accompanies it is destruction. C.P. Snow said:

“Technology is a queer thing. It gives you gifts with one hand and stabs you in the back with the other.”

Technology is the means by which the titans move in the world. It is the contradiction of lifelessness and life itself. Jünger clarifies that last part of his brother’s paragraph saying:

“The titans are not in need of prayers; they are worshiped by work. They are highly esteemed although their name is hidden behind their acts. So today one doesn’t say Uranus but rather Uranium. Even Pluto although empowered by the earth does not belong on Olympus.”8

That the titans are served by work is probably one of the more profound statements of the modern age. Here is the understanding that the rhythm of work is the worship of those who are godless or have fallen into forgetfulness. Work is the mantra of the industrial hot houses, the modern states, and it has replaced the prayers once uttered. Work is how man has come to be identified, employed or unemployed. Ultimately work has become freedom itself, you are free to work as the saying goes.

After visiting a tar sands site in Canada, this is some of what Neil Young had to say:

“The fuel’s all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town," Young recalled. "The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”

“Yeah it’s going to put a lot of people to work," Young said of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which is slated to transport the excavated tar sands to export terminals in Texas and Louisiana. "I’ve heard that, and I’ve seen a lot of people that would dig a hole that’s so deep that they couldn’t get out of it, and that’s a job too, and I think that’s the jobs that we are talking about there with the Keystone pipeline,” he said.

What is interesting about this is the palpability of the entire scene, the smells, the vision and finally the helplessness of it all. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The greed of technicians has unleashed another titan and there will be no putting it back so easily into the bottle. When Young ties the element of work to that, you have a perfect example of Jünger’s perception of the age. One might say that the two elements at work here are titans in the form of the elements and the gestalt of the worker. The argument for unleashing this titan is work and the titans are further served by it. The hole Young is talking about is of course proverbial, but the cleanup of that mess is a hole that will be very hard to escape. Friedrich Jünger writes:

“As we look around today we feel that we are living in a giant mill which works day and night at a furious, feverish pace. In blast furnaces and converters the fires blaze and roar; everywhere the streams of molten metal are pouring forth and huge ingots are glowing cherry red. This is the workshop of the titans. The industrial landscape is volcanic in its character, and thus is found especially in the areas of heavy industries, all the companion-signs of volcanic eruptions: lava ashes fumaroles, smoke, gases night clouds reddened by flames – and devastation spreading far and wide. Titanic elemental forces captured in marvelous engines are straining against pistons and cylinder walls as crankshafts are moving and deliver an even flow of power.”9

There is no better description of the nature of both the titanic and its relationship to the gestalt of the worker. This then is a good point for the transition to the next phase, where our anti-hero the worker enters. He is as Ernst Jünger describes him:

“The worker like Antaios is a direct son of the earth; his appearance is accompanied by tremors that are perceived as tectonic. The night is flooded by the glow of the blacksmith’s fire before its dawn. He detests divided earth like an artificial piece of clothing that restricts the body.”10

Antaios is a son of Gaia titan mother of the earth and Poseidon. He is a giant who lived in the deserts of Libya. Known for his great strength he challenged all who met him to wrestle, killing them one by one stating that he would build a temple to the glory of his father from their skulls. All was well until he met his match in Hercules. Hercules had been told by Athena that Antaios derived his overpowering strength through his contact with the earth, his mother. In order to defeat him he would have to break this bond. So Hercules lifted the giant off the ground and crushed his ribs killing him thusly.

So it is that like Antaios, the worker derives his strength first and foremost from his contact with the earth. He is a technocrat who derives his power from the manipulation of the elements. He is scientific and a materialist. Take away the elements that form the ground of his technology and he becomes powerless. The opening paragraph could be used to describe him. As a one-eyed titan he is not able to see completely. The cyclops is a metaphor for impaired vision. Like the presumptuous schoolmaster, he teaches by his bias and is open to nothing but what he deems scientifically worthy. Jünger says:

“Where the gods were, reason must enter.”

Or you could say where the Divine once was. Reason is the school master’s religion as it is the religion of the worker. It comes as no wonder that reason and science should fill the void left by the divine.

To call him an anti-hero might seem a bit hyperbolic, but as we will see and many of us already know there are few redeeming qualities in the gestalt of the worker. That there were “Helden der Arbeit”, heroes of work, in East Germany and the Soviet Union should come as no surprise. Previously, we mentioned that the worker serves the titans and as Friedrich Jünger has noted – where the titans rule; theirs is a godless realm. From this point of view the ethos of the worker is atheistic and by extension nihilist. It is devoid of the divine and the mercy bestowed on all creatures by it.

It is important to note that neither Ernst Jünger nor his brother Friedrich, believed that there were literally gods and titans. They were not pagans, but they did find a language in the mythos of the Greeks that helped them understand deeply what was happening in their age. The other point that should be clear here is that when Ernst Jünger quotes Leon Bloy in his works stating, “Dieu se retire” (God has retired); or Nietzsche’s famous statement, “God is dead”, they are not talking about the creation as we know it, rather they are talking again in the language of metaphor and that God, or better yet, the Divine has left the hearts of men. It is not to be forgotten that when Nietzsche writes his most notorious words, they are marked by the contradiction of the eternal reoccurrence of the same. Jünger mentions this in the work Prognosen:

“Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ can only mean that the epochal state of understanding is not sufficient. Moreover the author contradicts himself with ‘the eternal reoccurrence’.”

Even by Nietzsche’s standards the divine will return. It is then from this point of view that the deep form (Gestalt) of the worker has no room for the divine in it, much like our age in which people have so little time in their lives for the divine, but we all have time for work.

What are the characteristics of this age of the worker? Ernst Jünger states:

“One must know that in the age of the worker, if it truly bears that name and not like all today’s [political] parties declaring themselves workers’ parties. There can be nothing that is not understood as work. Work is the tempo of the fist, of thought, of the heart, life by day and night, science, love, art, belief, education, war; work is the vibration of the atom and the power of the stars and the solar system moved.”11

This description by way of Meyer gets to the bottom of the matter:

“That it was inconceivable that an atom was found not to be working, Jünger had recorded three years previously after a walk at night through Berlin during which he was fascinated by a mighty flywheel.” 12

The characteristic of the worker and his realm is that all things are put to work; his ethos penetrates even to the atomic level as he binds the atom to work using nuclear science. It is as Ernst Jünger says, nothing can escape this form:

“The worker fights and dies at the technical apparatus, not only without higher ideals but also in conscious rejection of them. His ethos lies in the clean operation of the machine. He does not have to worry; he does not understand the plan. Sometimes the national identity is called upon but only as an enlistment, a concession to passion.”13

Nothing is outside of the realm of the worker anymore and that once all the elements are brought together and everything has been brought under the “herrschaft” or rule of the worker, this then is the completion of the world state:

“From the unending distance in the terrible will to unconditional world power in the military, economic and intellectual sense, in the fact of the world war and the idea of the world revolution, in purposefulness and through the means of faustian technology and invention the teaming masses of mankind are welded to a whole.”14

This welding of the masses is clarified by this statement of Ernst Jünger:

“The world state deals with the problem of the transition of the gestalt of the worker from a planetary power to a planetary order—a consolidation that one can predict with certainty. It will end the age of the fighting states.”15

We are seeing the last throes of the old world passing now in North Africa with the Arab Spring. Is it not ironic that Libya was the former playground of Antaios? Soon the banks will have made the final inroads to establishing ‘the technique’ prevalent everywhere else in the world, micro-loans will be floated, credit cards distributed and the chains of the titans will be forged to completion. That the ethos of the worker is already intellectually at home there is clear, but what had not happened until now was the ultimate atomization of that society. This had been prevented until now by dictators and despots. These individuals had prevented the free flow of debt into the general populace. They therefore had to be removed by the ‘Arab Spring’.

We have said that the titans require work and that their realm is a godless realm. Their works are devoid of the Divine. They do not amount to a blade of grass, a grain of wheat, a mosquito wing. Martin Heidegger commenting on nihilism in his work Nietzsche states:

“To think ‘nihilism’ thus does not mean to produce ‘mere thoughts’ about it in one’s head, and as a mere spectator to retreat from reality. Rather to think ‘nihilism’ means to stand in that wherein every act and every reality of this era in Western history receives its time and space, its ground and its background, its means and ends, its order and its justification, its certainty and its insecurity – in a word its truth.”16

As Heidegger lays out the method to uncover nihilism, he describes one of the major elements in the work of Ernst Jünger. This is Heidegger’s key to Jünger’s concept of the Worker, “With the revaluation of all past values an unrestricted challenge has been issued to men: that unconditionally from, through, and over themselves, they raise “new standards” under which the accommodation of being as a whole to a new order must be effected. Because the “transcendent,” the “beyond” and “heaven” have been abolished, only the “earth” remains.” This is nihilism.

The earth is the realm of the worker. He dominates it by manipulation of the elements and the enslaving of the spirit, not in physical chains but in something more insidious, chains that limit one’s ability to think:

“ÔNihilism’ is the increasingly dominant truth that all prior aims of being have become superfluous.”17

Heidegger uses the term “the increasingly dominant truth”, I believe we are now witnessing the hegemony of that truth, the ascendancy of nihilism. Remember this process was not complete when Heidegger wrote those words. Surely, the process had come a long way, but there were places that had remained unsullied by this most pernicious thought. Yet more than eighty years on we find it difficult to imagine anything or anyone that remains innocent of this colonization of the minds of men. Ernst Jünger describes this from another perspective in his essay, Über die Linie:

“The decline in values is mainly a decline in Christian values. It corresponds with the inability to bring forth higher thoughts or even to conceive of them. This leads to pessimism that develops into nihilism...”

What is of interest here is the defense of western and Christian systems of thought by the immigrant Muslim population themselves. It is not uncommon that the immigrant Muslim uncritically defends the systems he has adopted, so that in a sense they have succumbed to Ernst Jünger’s description of European nihilism. Although initially a western phenomenon, nihilism has spread throughout all the cultures of the world.

Let us review a few points here. The definition of nihilism is that values are reversed. Values that were once thought to be the essence of virtue are lowered to the place of values once thought ugly and worthless and vice versa. This can be seen best in almost all forms of art today. It has become all but impossible to represent beauty, goodness or heroism in film and literature today. It has been replaced by stories of the nakedness of the human spirit and its weakness and insufficiency. Our heroes today are thieves, murderers, adulterers and prostitutes. While one might argue that this turn of events has occurred with the great authors of nihilism itself, such as Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Nietzsche, among others, theirs were works of prognosis, a taking account of the state of things, if you will. It was not the lifting up of these characters to a pantheon of nihilistic heroes so common today, but rather an exploring of the source of nihilism itself.

In one sense the highest values never devalue. The values are only replaced by those who themselves have lost sight of something higher than themselves. Once again from Über die Linie:

“It (nihilism) is an expression of the uselessness of the other world but not of the world and existence.”

By this definition of nihilism, mankind has lost access to the divine. What now plagues us especially here in the West, but more or less around the world, is the inability to recognize the divine in and around us. The loss of this capability has nothing to do with a lack or a general inability; rather it is that the hearts of men have become weak and atrophied. It remains for us to know that what has transpired is a phase in the history of being here. Jünger states:

“Today the term nihilism counts not only as undetermined and disputed; it is also used polemically. One must however suspect nihilism as a great destiny, as a basic power whose influence cannot be evaded by anyone.”

Nihilism is inextricably bound up with the here and now. It is in us in ways that are both conscious and subconscious and this is the importance of the works of these great thinkers mentioned here. When Nietzsche describes himself as he does in The Will to Power:

“Europe’s first absolute nihilist, who has already lived nihilism in himself to its end. He has it behind, under and outside of his self.”

He sets a task for every one of us – we must do the same. So it is that by man’s knowledge of the divine that the titans will ultimately be defeated and the nihilism of the gestalt of the worker will be relegated to the past, just as Hercules defeated Antaios in concert with the divine knowledge of Athena:

“The battle of the titans and the twilight of the gods are meta-historic – they reach out from nature and the cosmos into history. Seen temporally it is to be assumed that the titans preceded the gods and control Chaos. This follows the myth – it is said that the titans begot and taught the gods. Their rebellion causes Olympus to falter – they were subdued by Zeus and exiled to the underworld. But they return – like the unchained Prometheus in the gestalt of the worker. The gods create from timelessness; the titans act and invent in time. They are more closely related to technology than the arts. Therefore Hölderlin advises the poet to dream and take solace in Dionysus while the iron ones rule—but he knows the gods return.”18

And so it is that we find ourselves in the age of the iron ones, it is not for us to despair but to take solace as in the advice of Hölderlin. He reminds us of the god of wine and dance, to which we in turn acknowledge the deep wisdom of the wine that neither intoxicates nor leaves us in stupor. It is in that that there is not only comfort but also safety. This recalls the poetry of the Sufis and the passages of Qur’an. After all, one of the great Sufis of the last century and the teacher of Shaykh Abdalqadir As-Sufi (Ian Dallas), was known as the wine pourer.

So, paraphrasing Hölderlin, Jünger reminds us that the divine will again return to the hearts of men. It is not for us to know how or when, but to be certain that it will happen. This is the answer to all the nihilistic rhetoric of our age. The message of these great men is one of both hope and certainty. As the oft repeated saying goes, it is always darkest before the dawn. Even the withering atheism of Nietzsche can be seen in a new light by the thinking of these great poets and philosophers. Once we have passed through this nihilism like Nietzsche, we can expect a new nomos on the other side.

Although I cannot remember who told me or where it occurs in Heidegger’s works, he is said to have believed that the saving of mankind had to arise out of the deepest end of nihilism and there is no place where nihilism has penetrated deeper than the West. Hölderlin said it thusly, “Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch.” – Where danger resides, there too is the saving. Our saving must by this thinking arise out of our own hearts. Then we can say, as Nietzsche, that we have gone through it and it is truly outside of and behind us. In his last interview published posthumously by Der Spiegel, Heidegger says something that he did not fully understand but I believe we can. He said, “Only a god can save us now.” Well, we know what that great thinker only had a glimmer of. That god is Allah, the incomparable, totally transcendent, without association or partners.

So what is the conclusion? I have introduced only a minimal sketch of the thinking of some of the greatest poets and philosophers of the past two centuries. Their thinking and writing, especially the brothers Jünger, sought to clarify the age in which they found themselves and we find ourselves. From Goethe and Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and the brothers Jünger, they complete and complement one another. It is hopefully sufficient to give some idea of what they thought of the age in which they lived and the consequences that we are bearing out.

That brings us to the end of today’s lecture. The subject of next week’s lecture is The Stranger which will be presented by Abdalhamid Evans. Thank you for your attention. Assalamu alaykum.

References

All translations are by A. Brown except The Failure of Technology by F. G. Jünger and Nietzsche by Martin Heidegger.